In a communication system, such as a wireless telecommunication system, data may be transmitted over the air between a base station and multiple static or mobile stations, such as, for example, personal computers, hand held devices, televisions, and cell phones. As high speed communication technologies, such as, high speed internet, WiMAX, high speed cellular network, become increasingly accessible to the general public, multicast broadcast services (MBS) have become a popular portion of wireless communication systems. Multicast broadcast services include multimedia contents, such as video and/or audio streams, text messages, and pictures. Multicast broadcast services provide a solution for one-to-multiple data transmission. For example, in a wireless cellular network, the base station can simultaneously transmit MBS data to multiple receivers, such as cellular phones, laptops, and PDAs.
IEEE 802.16 standard is developed for governing applications in high bandwidth wireless network access for both mobile and static users. The current version under development is 802.16m. One of the focuses in the IEEE 802.16m standard is multicast broadcast services (MBS), which may also be referred to as enhanced MBS (EMBS). The base station transmits MBS data to the mobile stations simultaneously, using the same modulation and coding scheme (MCS).
Network coding technology can be used to encode data for Multicast Broadcast Services (MBS) data transmission in various communication systems, such as, for example, WiMAX systems and 4G cellular systems. Network coding technology can reduce the amount of data transmitted over a network, thereby increasing the network operation efficiency. For example, IEEE C802.16m-09/0072r1, by Hua Xu, et al., titled “Network coding-based retransmission schemes for E-MBS with and without MS feedback,” IEEE 802.16m Session #59, Jan. 13, 2009, provides a network coding retransmission scheme for EMBS. However, the network coding retransmission scheme proposed by Hua Xu et al. is performed using an arbitrary retransmission block size without an uplink feedback. This random network coding scheme may adversely affect the data transmission reliability in some applications.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to have methods or systems that, in some applications, may provide improvements over the existing technology.